de. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and
a warm glow upon the waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the
forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen.

"It is a day of days," she said, as I approached; "a day of all days
either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and
life--ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!"

I kissed her forehead, and she continued:

"I am dying, yet shall I live."

"Morella!"

"The days have never been when thou couldst love me--but her whom in
life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore."

"Morella!"

"I repeat I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection--ah,
how little!--which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit
departs shall the child live--thy child and mine, Morella's. But thy
days shall be days of sorrow--that sorrow which is the most lasting of
impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours
of thy happiness are over and joy is not gathered twice in a life, as
the roses of Paestum twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, play
the Teian with time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine,
thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on the earth, as do the
Moslemin at Mecca."

"Morella!" I cried, "Morella! how knowest thou this?" but she turned
away her face upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming over her limbs,
she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.

Yet, as she had foretold, her child, to which in dying she had given
birth, which breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child,
a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature and intellect, and
was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved her
with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to feel for any
denizen of earth.

But, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, and
gloom, and horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said the child
grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange, indeed, was her
rapid increase in bodily size, but terrible, oh! terrible were the
tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the development
of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered
in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the
woman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and
when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from
its full